California has long epitomized the future in a global imagination. How did this association come to be? Historically a frontier of European westward expansion in settler colonialism, the US state is now one of the world’s largest economies. It is associated with technological innovation, natural beauty, and progressive politics, but also with environmental catastrophe and escalating inequality. Contradictions abound between technological advances and crumbling transportation infrastructure, exuberant wealth and desolate tent cities of the homeless, modern architecture and ancient redwood trees, a remote workforce and local farmworkers, cultural pluralism and “tech-bro” monoculture, a fresh sea breeze and toxic orange skies, communal and individualist politics, between North and South. And this is to only name a few.
How did California become a temporal and spatial frontier – how did this place become a stand-in for a (possibly inevitable) human future? Whose ideas have shaped California and what created such an intensely contradictory situation?
The course will take ethnographic, historical, geographic, and literary perspectives on such questions. Paying attention to contemporary ethics problems in tech sectors – such as gender and racial inequality – an arc of the class will be to trace a genealogy from settler visions of better futures to contemporary technocratic futurism. By the end of this course, you will have learned how history has shaped utopian imaginaries of technological human futures in California, how the “Wild West” links up with contemporary techies, and what/whose visions continue to drive global ideas about human and planetary futures. You will have gained a deep understanding of this place as it symbolizes the future and futurism itself – an understanding that engenders key lessons for planning, building, and innovating with human (and other) collectives in mind.
Anna Jabloner
Dr. Anna Jabloner is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at IE University. Jabloner holds a Mag.Phil. from the University of Vienna (2004) and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2015). Between 2019-2023, Jabloner taught anthropology and Science & Technology Studies (STS) at Harvard University, where her teaching excellence was recognized each semester. Jabloner joins IE from Goethe University in Frankfurt, where she was a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Fixing Futures: Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies.” She previously held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Stanford and Columbia Medical Schools. Jabloner’s main field of research is the anthropology of science, with a regional specialization in the US. Her work centers on the sociopolitical dimensions of science, technology, data, and medicine, on biopolitics and bioethics, temporality, feminist epistemologies, as well as race, gender, sexuality, and class. Jabloner’s book manuscript in progress is titled “Future Pending: Genomics, California, and the American Technological Imagination.” She is the author of Implodierende Grenzen. Ethnizität und ‘Race’ in Donna Haraways Technowissenschaft [Imploding Boundaries: Ethnicity and Race in Donna Haraway’s Technoscience, 2005] and of recent articles in the journals Social Analysis, Science as Culture, Anthropology Now, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Nature Biotechnology.
